Yesterday someone slapped me upside the head by giving me a one-star rating on my blog. Ouch!

It's a good thing I'm not a beginner who would be hurt by such cruelty, sniff! Driveby ratings like this one could seriously impair someone who is impressionable or who easily might have their feelings hurt.

The one-star is to be used when the subject entry or folder "needs work". So on face value my blog must be full of mis-spellings, bad editing, poor construction and the like to receive such a bad rating. Oddly enough the majority of folks who gave me the five-star rating praised my writing, even going so far as to say they thought my blog was better written than nationally syndicated blogs they read.

This person who gave me the driveby must think otherwise, or (horror of horrors!) was just using the rating system as if it were a stick to beat me with.

I would be concerned except for one thing. The statistics of my blog tell me the driveby rater isn't a writer, and instead style themselves as an "avid reader". Since this person isn't a writer, and therefore not my peer, I'm not concerned.

The driveby rater is female, between 18-24 years old, a college grad and un-married, probably because she walks around with her nose bent all the time and is presumably unattractive for that reason.

The driveby rater is also a coward who doesn't have the wits or courage to face me with the reason they dislike me so much. Did I say something? Did they disagree? I'll never know, sigh!!

I've made good friends on this website, I've also ran into people with whom I've disagreed, but in the four years I've been here I've never smacked anyone with punitive driveby ratings. It must be because I'm mature and mature people don't do things like that, but it also could be because I'm not a coward and if I don't like something I'm not afraid to say why.

I'm not a fan of our rating system allowing driveby anonymous ratings. As a person it is quite possible I "need work", but I'm very careful to make sure my writing doesn't (except for when I write badly with intention and then I celebrate getting a one-star rating).

Presumably the driveby rater has done their worst and won't come back to read this, which is too bad because they won't be able to read my snappy comeback to their driveby skills...something my landlord said the other day about a woman talking on a cell-phone and driving erratically, "She couldn't drive a stick up a goat's ass."

But in case the person does come back to read more I issue a challenge: Get up on your hindlegs and act like a responsible adult if you're able, if you've an opinion express it, that's what adults do.
 

I haven’t seen the movie by Al Gore, “An Inconvenient Truth” as yet, I’m waiting for it to come out on DVD, but I sense the timing of his message is both impeccable and too late at the same time.

Al’s timing is impeccable if he hopes to use the movie’s groundswell of support in a political campaign, it is too late because the message wasn’t delivered and believed a long time ago. It just may be too late to reverse the course of global warming and the ramifications such warming have on extreme weather.

I know this sounds crazy but I think we’re heading pell-mell into an ice age. Here’s some reasons why I think that. It’s not fuzzy science anymore to see increased CO2 emissions in the form of burning fossil fuels, huge wildfires we can’t contain, rain forest decimation by the torch for short-term agricultural purposes and erupting volcanoes have contributed to global warming.

This isn’t a new thing for our planet, but what it has to do in response to global warming is something we’ve no recorded history about and we could very well learn to our chagrin how miniscule humanity really is in nature’s scheme.

My theory is ice ages naturally follow periods of huge carbon dioxide releases. The hot-house effect these releases create melts the water stored in ice-caps and glaciers. All that water adds to the rising ocean levels, that much more water everywhere creates cloud systems and storms like we’ve never seen before. This blanket of moisture cools the earth until the moisture falls as ice this precipitates an ice age, pardon the pun. But the thing we know the littlest about is how long the process takes.

What if it happens pretty fast, like the last recorded ice age in Europe, which came and went in about a hundred years, that probably would be doable for present-day humans to live through, for the most part. Imagine glaciers extending all the way to Texas, I guess we’d have to learn to get along with the Mexicans a lot better.

If a mile high sheath of ice covered your property for a couple hundred years you’d probably lose interest in retaining the title. Owning property as a concept would be exposed for the temporary conceit it is among humans. Perhaps we’d have done better to think of it as just borrowing or using the land until Mother Nature decided to take it back.

But I don’t think I’ll personally live long enough to see whether or not my theory pans out. I do know from having lived on the planet for fifty-odd years that I feel a disturbance in the force. We’re seeing things happen on a big scale, things no one has seen before.

On the Oregon coast, which is maybe two hundred miles all told, there is a stretch of about ninety miles that is currently a dead zone. By that I mean fish, crabs, in fact anything requiring oxygen to live, have died in that zone, it is a dead zone. The temperature of the ocean has risen there and plankton boomed as a result, consuming all the oxygen in the water, until everything dies, including themselves. This dead zone extends twenty or so miles out to sea. A couple of years ago marine biologists were surprised to see a much smaller dead zone, they’d never seen anything like it before. The dead zone is about ten times bigger now.

Our country is the foremost consumer and polluter on this planet. When everyone else in the world says “Hey, let’s slow this thing down” we thumb our noses at them and go to it even harder. Fuzzy science, my ass, we’ve sowed the wind, the whirlwind should be along shortly for the reaping.



 

In my earlier blog article (where I waxed nostalgic about the John Day country of Oregon) I wrote about the influx of Chinese workers during the 1870’s in Grant County, and the enduring presence of the Kam Wah Chung building in modern John Day. Folks who read the article wanted to know what happened to the Chinese, why, when and where did they go?

First a little history. In the mid 1800’s China experienced two very strong depressions. In the middle of all that poverty gold was discovered in America, sparking a desire in China for poor men to go to Gum San (Gold mountain) in hopes of getting enough gold to lift their families out of poverty. For the most part the Chinese who came to America during that time were men not interested in immigration, but rather to amass fortunes to take back to China. Subsequently there was no interest either in assimilating, they stuck to their ways, didn’t try to learn English or try to build community beyond housing for workers to occupy temporarily.

The fact the Chinese remained insulated and separate didn’t sit well with the white settlers (who also were relative newcomers to the area) and anti-Chinese feelings were prevalent among the whites just about everywhere the Chinese came to find work, including the John Day area.

The original gold strike happened in Canyon City which is situated only a couple of miles from John Day and is now the county seat of Grant County. A mysterious fire destroyed the Canyon City Chinatown and the local white residents forbade its reconstruction, so the Chinese moved to John Day, constituting in the 1880’s nearly half the population of the city.

An interesting note is the local ‘Chinese’ cemetery, the currently named Restlawn Cemetery, where only a handful of the graves are of Chinese people. The two Chinese who operated the Kam Wah Chung mercantile in John Day, “Doc” Hay and An Lung are buried there. The fact more Chinese people were not buried there is twofold, first being the lack of interest among the Chinese to actually settle in John Day and the second being the tradition of sending the bodies back to China to be buried.

Perhaps more Chinese would have settled in the area had it not been for the Exclusion Act of 1882 which barred Chinese from emigrating to America. The Act was not repealed until 1943, during WWII, when the Chinese became our allies against the Japanese. Effectively the Chinese men who were already here couldn’t bring brides over to live with them, or their families from China, so when the goldstrike was over, or the railroad they helped to build was completed, the Chinese men either went home or to larger Chinatowns in Seattle and San Francisco.

In the HBO series “Deadwood” the Chinaman Wu cuts off his queue (pigtail) to signal his decision to stay in America. I don’t know if “Doc” Hay or An Lung cut off their queues in similar fashion, but the fact they’re buried in John Day would suggest they made the same decision as Wu makes. Coincidentally, An Lung started the first car lot in John Day, selling Model T’s.

As well, it would have been a hardship for Chinese to endure the widespread racism prevalent among white settlers during that time. I’d like to say the racist attitudes of the 19th century are no longer a concern, but I’d be lying, as Hispanic immigrants to Western America can attest to.

I found an interesting quote from a Chinese person living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early 1900’s which could have been written by a Hispanic of today:

"Why did we have to depart from our parents and loved ones and come to stay in a place far away from our homes? It is for no reason but to make a living. In order to make a living here, we have to endure all year around drudgery and all kinds of hardship. We are in a state of seeking shelter under another person's face, at the threat of being driven away at any moment. We have to swallow down the insults hurled at us."

It just goes to show the more things change the more they stay the same.


 

A local conservative, whom I’ll call Don, is quite fond of writing letters to the editor in our newspaper. A lot of the time his letters are full of name-calling, playing the blame game on Clinton, lambasting Mexicans, gays, etc., but recently he turned his formidable intellect on this so-called global warming hoax.

What Don did was float ice-cubes in a pickle jar. He then marked the level of the combined water and ice and left for work. When he returned home the ice had melted but, and get this, the water level was exactly the same as before! With his results in hand he quickly wrote a letter to the editor debunking the entire global warming myth.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Bush administration hired Don immediately to join an already impressive gathering of industry scientists poo-poohing global warming, evolution and Copernicus’ theory that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth.

I am relieved to find from such a simple experiment that we’ve nothing to fear from all these melting ice-caps and such. Don’t worry New York, or Los Angeles, you won’t be underwater after all. Next Don’ll take on other liberal sacred cows like acid rain, mercury levels, ozone depletion, the destruction of the rain forest, and the like.

Pure scientists like Don are in big demand these days, kind of modern-day Archimedes, I guess, but essential if we’re going to keep burning coal to make electricity, selling SUV behemoths regardless of their gas mileage, and consuming resources like there’s no tomorrow.

Don may have his hands full, though, rebutting liberal whiners who wrote their own letters pointing out that 80% of the world’s water is locked up in glaciers inconveniently located on top of land (not floating in the oceans) and now melting at an ever-increasing rate. But to a first-rate scientific mind like Don’s this should prove to be no problem and I for one am looking forward to his further experimentation.

To show my confidence in Don’s pickle-jar world vision, I am selling all the inner-tubes, water wings, and life preservers I’ve been stocking up on, and canceling those classes I signed up for at the local swimming pool designed to teach me how to tread water.

 

Every so often I’ll get the movie “Pulp Fiction” again and watch it. The movie is lurid and distasteful, even unpleasant, full of profanity and violence it dredges right along the bottom of the human experience. I love it.

I’m not a huge fan of the director, Quentin Tarantino, in fact this is the only movie of his I like, but I would have to say in Pulp Fiction he gets some incredible and realistic performances from the actors he selected. John Travolta’s character “Vincent Vega” as an egocentric hitman can’t keep himself from shooting his mouth off, and a seemingly inconsequential, if unnecessary insult to Bruce Willis’ character “Butch” results in Vega’s death.

Butch asks a staring Vega (in Marcellus’ bar, after Butch has taken a payoff to throw the fight) “What are you looking at, friend?” To which Vincent replies, “You’re not my friend, Palooka.” Butch can’t believe it, “What did you call me?”
“I think you heard me, punchy,” Vincent tells him before he goes off to embrace Marcellus like a prodigal son. Vincent Vega is the best performance I’ve ever seen before or since from Travolta, and the most believable.

All the characters are flawed, even the impeccable Marcellus Wallace, perfect in every way save for the band-aid on his neck, and his murderous warlord tendencies. Christopher Walken’s character insures the young impressionable Butch will grow up flawed, with a mission to carry on the warrior tradition embodied by his Great-Grandfather’s gold wrist watch, Butch becomes a mercenary boxer loyal only to himself and Fabian (his camp follower). Willis plays the unlikely samurai Butch very well, and Ving Rhames as Wallace dominates every scene he’s in.

But the very best acting in the movie, in my opinion, is done by Samuel L. Jackson. In the very last scene, the restaurant robbery, Jackson embodies the angel of death taking the day off, I get chills every time I watch that scene. After turning the tables on the would-by restaurant robbers, he chants his normal death-chant from Ezekiel, but lets them off the hook. “You are the weak and I am the tyranny of evil men, but I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd,” he tells them, buying their lives with the proceeds from his own wallet, rather than kill them like he normally would do.

When Pulp Fiction first came out I saw it with a couple of friends who were appalled by it, so repulsed they couldn’t say anything good about it at all, it was a waste of celluloid with no redeeming value. The same movie season also saw the release of “Fargo” and “Natural Born Killers,” with Pulp Fiction they presented an unholy trilogy of violence and mayhem. Fargo is another movie I get and watch regularly, although Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers didn’t impress me enough to watch again, in my view it lacks the reality that so fascinates me about the other two movies.

And what is so fascinating to me about movies with no redeeming value? Movies that don’t leave us feeling good, like all the pablum we’ve been fed by Hollywood for decades? I don’t know, maybe it’s like the time we drove past a head-on collision when I was a kid and I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the crunched-up body in the back seat of the VW, horrible as it was. Perhaps we find relief from the fact these things happen to other people, a relief in the hope we somehow got lucky, we got through it and none of it stuck to us which makes us clean in a perverse kind of way.

My two friends probably haven’t seen Pulp Fiction again, I imagine they didn’t like “The Big Lebowski” either. There’s no accounting for taste, is there?

 

I try my best to avoid controversy, except when it comes to our idiot president and his money-grubbing cronies. No, I try to take the high road, believing in my motto “If better minds than I possess ignore it, maybe there’s a lesson there.”

Pragmatically what this philosophy boils down to is for the past forty years Israel has been involved in one crisis after another, each threatening more holocaust, more Armageddon, more brinks of WWIII, so maybe if I ignore this present emergency the pot will quit boiling over on the stove temporarily. I stress ‘temporarily’ because it will boil up again.

The whole thing is deceptively simple, really, all that must happen is for the cocksuckers of the world to finally realize that living the good life doesn’t involve killing other people and then getting killed in return. Murderous lifestyles have proven detrimental to families, neighborhoods, economies and necessary infrastructures. The concept seems to be too simple, and plumb escapes understanding among the cocksuckers who answer a higher calling and believe this mayhem they are causing is a mandate from their god.

I heard Rush Gingrich proclaim on national TV that we’re already involved in WWIII, and the only thing we’ve got to look forward to is helping out the Israelis by invading Syria from Iraq, where we’ve got a strong presence. What a great idea! And then we could fend off Iran’s attempts to help out their allies the Syrians, Iraq could take its rightful place in history being a suitable no-man’s land, and the heat would once more be off Bin Laden who got us into this in the first place.

Thank God our idiot president didn’t decide to stabilize America.

 

Psychics are a lot of fun, sort of like an amusement park or something. A psychic takes you on a journey to a place you’ve never been before, the future. At least you expect them to take you on the journey, you pay money for the trip, but I’d have to hazard that where you really go is still up in the air.

Some psychics are great at fishing. All they have to do is tell you they see an older woman by your right shoulder and then wait for you to fill in the blanks. “It must be my mother, she died when I was little,” you volunteer and the psychic suddenly has a channel, a way to advise you.

I haven’t visited too many psychics, but I’ve been fished. One psychic fell in love with me and wanted me to leave my girlfriend and our plans for a trip to South America to come live with him. I would be bored in South America, he predicted, I’d hate it, life would be so much more interesting living with him in his beautiful house in the middle of a pear orchard. The older woman hovering above my right shoulder agreed with him.

One time I visited another psychic, a German, not that it matters where he came from, but if the psychic has a foreign accent we’re more likely to believe them for some reason. Anyway this German didn’t try to fish me, he told me about my crown chakra being wide open and giving off a purple aura, which I thought was quite complimentary. Unfortunately after that discovery he couldn’t find a way to get in to see anything else, claiming I was “blocked,” and try as he might I just wouldn’t open up. I had failed him and really had no reason to expect a discount, a refund or a rain-check.

You find out a lot of things about yourself when you visit psychics. I, for example have lived two perfect lives already, one as a king in the Horn of Africa region back in antiquity and one as a healer in 19th Century China. But it’s pretty clear this lifetime won’t qualify as a third, sigh, better luck next time.

The Hungarian Gypsy told me about the two hundred life-times I’d lived as a sorcerer, both men and women, my soul trying to get past wanting power over people and things of the world. This has actually been a good tip and led me to understand the best way to wield power is not to, although I do occasionally use my power to make slow cars ahead of me turn off, using Jedi mind tricks and a wave of the index finger.

I have heard of people getting addicted to psychics, running up huge phone bills on the Psychic Hotline. One prediction easy to make would be, “I see your phone bill hovering over your right shoulder, it’s huge.” Why folks are so crazy about knowing the future is beyond me, but even crazier yet are the folks who actually believe what the psychic says and tailors their lives to this knowledge generated from someone saying, “As I vibrate with you.”

Personally I don’t have any more curiosity about the future, I don’t want to know what happens, I want it to be a big surprise. And that younger woman hovering over my left shoulder? I don’t want to know who she is, let it be a mystery, maybe she’s my daughter, maybe a lover, maybe my next ex-wife, maybe it’s me, transgendered. Anything can happen, for crying out loud, in this case I think my prudent course is to be ignorant, a state of mind leading to bliss.

 

I’m not much for TV. About the only TV I’ll watch is on PBS, which if I had cable would leave 50 or so channels wanting. As I’ve said before I’ve been watching TV for half a century and my review of the medium is it’s sucky.

But since I’ve gotten a DVD I’ve been watching all the movies and such that I want, my only shortfall is not knowing what’s out there to see. Lucky for me a friend recommended “Deadwood” which originally aired on HBO.

At first glance I wondered what he was talking about. It was dark, as if it were filmed without lights (and with a red filter, there being a lot of bloodshed). But it’s grown on me and I’m well into the second season and a big fan.

Some folks are put off from “Deadwood” because of the profanity. As a card-carrying Bachelor of Art in English you’d think I’d be one of them, but this is not the case. I love the depth of meaning one can get from profanity, the shading of emotion garnered eclipses the moral lapseitude (which I know isn’t a word, but my diploma gives me latitude).

Besides I believe the way they talked in the old west is more consistent in “Deadwood” than it is in “Shane” or any other Hollywood Western. And being an impressionable geezer as I’ve already admitted, I find myself spicing my monologue with “cocksucker” this and “fucking” that. Perhaps it is a way of identifying with the Olde West (another of my writing themes).

I think I’ll look back over my Western writing and throw in some profanity, why not? If I were a rap artist it would already be extant. Perhaps rap is the new Western mode. Americans have always had a love affair with the West, Western, cowboy, etc., even our President wears a white hat. The murderous lawlessness appeals to us for some reason, even influencing foreign policy, and yet most of us really know the falsehoods this view of history is based on.

In Deadwood, the real American philosophy is on display. Rape the land, kill anybody that gets in the way, and fight real civilization tooth and nail to delay it getting a foothold. That’s the true saga of the West, one that’s still going on today out here where there’s room to do “bidness as usual”.

It took me a few episodes to get into the story, but how I’m hooked. Watch it if you’ve a mind to, or if you’re some kind of religious cocksucker, don’t. It doesn’t make a fucking bit of difference to me, even if the religious hoopleheads among us gave this country the conglomeration of fucking cocksuckers that leads it today.

And that’s all I’ll say on the topic of politics.



Dale Arthur

** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only **
 

No, I'm not channeling Wordsworth today, just celebrating another birthday.

Fifty-seven years today, egad!! I think of what I'd like to do next birthday in the hopes I might actually live long enough to do them. For me this is the first time I've thought I might not see another birthday.

You're probably thinking here is where he tells us he has some kind of terminal cancer or something. I hate to disappoint you, but I seem to be fairly healthy to date with no nasty prognosis hanging over my head like the guillotine or something.

No I'm just 57 today, and Friday the thirteenth happens on a Thursday this month.

I never expected to live this long even though I've tried to be safe and not die stupidly before now. I just didn't believe I'd be a thinking, functioning, artistic so and so, enjoying life and still wanting to get laid now and again this late in life.

Shit I remember when thirty seemed old and what's happened? Now I'm older than dirt but faced with a real dilemna, I'm happier now than any other time in my life.

My golf game is the best it's ever been, I'm content being a single man and I hardly have any credit card debt. Go figure!! I wouldn't mind getting laid but not at the risk of upsetting my fragile psychological equanimity (look that up in your Funk & Wagnall's!)

Bless my heart! I hope to live another year and only God, that evil malignant genious, stands in my way. If all goes well I'll write another birthday greeting to you all next year. If not you'll know the reason why...
 

Embracing my inner geezer

I just spent four days camping in the woods with about 15,000 other folks who were all blissfully unaware of the events occurring outside the Oregon Country Fair. People had to come in from the outside to tell us simple things, like, who won the World Cup? We were cut off from news about Iraq, we totally missed the story about the father who poisoned his children with soup so he could sue Campbell’s, in some ways I guess I wish I were still out there.

The Oregon Country Fair gives me a direction in my life. Every morning a bunch of us “Elders” meet down by the main stage and drink coffee in the sunshine. Naturally we also tell a number of lies, but that’s to be expected. But this year we came to a great understanding, we came to know the true nature of what it is to be a “Geezer”.

Out at the Fair the elders are being recognized. To be an elder you have to have actively participated in twenty Oregon Country Fairs and you have to be older than 50 or so. Several years ago we coffee-drinking sunshine-worshipping elders decided the place we met each morning should rightly be called from hence-forward the “Geezer” bench, and so an arty member of our group made a lovely wooden sign to hang above our bench.

The Oregon Country Fair is all about being spiritual, about finding your place in nature and community. If a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, each year at the Country Fair is like one of them, or something approaching it, if you can get enough coffee in you after being kept up all night by wild hoople-heads roaming through the fair hooting like the Barbary apes they descended from.

But anyway, we reached a consensus there on the Geezer bench as to the difference between “geezers” and “elders”. Elders get the respect they deserve, geezers are a subset of the elders, but we don’t get or deserve any respect. Curiously, we all agreed we’d rather be geezers.

I’ll give you an example. Two women, late forties, walk up to the bench with their breakfasts in hand and prepare to sit down until they see the “Geezers” sign. One laughingly says “I don’t know if we can sit here, we’re not quite fifty yet,” to which I assured her “Sit down, Sweetie, you look fifty to me.” An elder would have been respectful and polite, a geezer plays the crowd for a laugh (the geezettes, or women geezers, in the group laughed the loudest).

Another good example of the difference would be to look at the Sunday morning Om circle. Every Sunday morning at the Fair a group of well-meaning folks will try and make a link of human hand-holding all the way around the fair and then Om a blessing. Your elder will join such an endeavor even if it means that elder will delay a morning meal of free-range eggs and tofu, washed down with coffee grown by contented indigenous Indians in Guatemala. The elder will Om until he or she is hoarse and feel all the love traditionally generated by Oming and handholding. Your geezer will walk right by an invitation to join the Om circle, refusing to be cajoled, ignoring the ardent cries of joiners still waiting for the magic hook-up, the spiritual switch to be thrown. The geezer needs to pee, or get coffee and then get back to the “Geezers” bench to continue hooting at the descendants of the Barbary apes who are in such a weakened state due to partying all night that even an Om circle can’t revitalize them much.

We learn a lot there on the bench, we geezers, we keep our eyes open and discover wonderful new ways to behave. We now have a new morning greeting for each other, learned by an attentive geezer when he passed a passel of vestal virgins.

He didn’t say for sure how many vestal virgins there were in the group, I’d have to think sixteen, like in the Procul Harem’s song “Whiter Shade of Pale.” But whatever their number he said they were lovely, dressed in their white “bride of Jesus” outfits. And to get themselves in the right frame of mind to go out into the sea of fair-goers they solemnly addressed each other with the blessing “namastė, mother-fucker”, which we impressionable geezers have now picked up like naughty children.

I personally didn’t see the vestal virgins, but I have the idea they’re a lot like the group of “brides” I saw last year, dressed in full regalia, white wedding gowns, and veils which still didn’t hide the fact several of them were badly in need of a shave. Maybe this year’s vestal virgins were actually last year’s brides, I would have to admit there wasn’t a one of them I wouldn’t have left at the altar.

This geezer is glad to be home after sleeping on the lumpy ground for four nights. I didn’t take my air mattress, just a thin foam egg-carton pad, there was a small ridge of dirt which felt like a mountain range right in the middle of my back. I wasn’t the only one uncomfortable, one morning one of my fellows complained of sleeping on a root, to which I told him I too had been sleeping on a root, but when I turned over onto my back it wasn’t there. It must have been a temporary root, like those you find on the Morning Wood Tree.